Last Thursday’s Guardian included a brief excerpt from Iain M Banks’ new novel, The Algebraist. I like his Culture novels quite a bit so it’s a shame that after a longer-than-usual gap between SF novels he’s decided to write a novel in a different setting, but I suppose I can live with the disappointment if I must.

The extract appears to be a prologue, serving to set the scene for the main story rather than introduce any of the characters we’ll be following, but I’m happy to trust Banks to deliver a story worth buying in hardback when it’s published in October. (Of course, knowing the way he plays around with his stories’ timelines it could just as well be that the Guardian extract is actually from somewhere in the middle, or it could even be the novel’s closing passage.)

Some wags who encounter a dirty car can’t resist the temptation to inscribe a “Wash Me!” message in the muck. But there are other ways to get the message across.

(For what it’s worth, I think it’s a hoax image - either a Photoshop job or the result of the couple in question striking a pose. It’s just too neat an image to be for real.)

Being a fairly recent convert to the world of superhero comics, until I read Lia’s post at cheesedip.com I had no idea that Marvel did a run of superhero spoofs of the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

Fun as some of the scans from the swimsuit issues are, the best image Lia links to isn’t a swimsuit shot at all; it’s this spoof deodorant ad featuring everyone’s favourite Canadian mutant. (Mind, I’d dearly love to see a bigger scan of this rather goofy group shot of Wolverine, The Thing, Beast and The Hulk sporting some very natty trunks.)

[Via Blog of a Bookslut]

A smaller than usual selection this week:

• A New Day by shaolinstyles: a surprisingly serene image of a Florida beach the morning after Hurricane Charlie paid a visit.
• This Potted Raccoon looks very comfortable.
• Gravity by krush: simple, but very effective work.

Trevor Corson’s book The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean is a mine of interesting information. For example, when he spoke to National Geographic he passed on a factoid that’s destined to stick in my mind for much longer than I’d really like:

[…]

How does a female seduce the male?

Essentially by drugging him into submission. When lobsters fight and when they flirt—in both cases they communicate with each other basically by pissing in each other’s faces. They have these little urine-release nozzles right under their eyes, and they squirt urine at each other.

The urine is laced with various kinds of information. In a fight it could be a communication of how aggressive or belligerent or dominant a lobster is.

The females, in this case of mating, go to the dominant male’s shelter entrance and squirt their pheromone-laced urine into his shelter. This relaxes [the alpha male] and reduces his aggression. He starts to swoon a little bit. He fans these little flippers under his tale to spread the urine around his apartment and savor its aroma.

[…]

What’s really icky is that later in the interview Corson drops this little revelation into the mix:

[…]

What’s the most surprising thing you learned about lobsters while researching your book?

Well, I had no idea about their mating habits, which are very interesting and surprising. At the same time, when you find out that this is what lobsters do, it’s sort of funny, because it sounds so familiar. [Emphasis added.]

[…]

The phrase “too much information” comes to mind…

[Via Exclamation Mark]

Judging by this Wired article, Dear Valued Customer, You Are a Loser by Rick Broadhead might just be worth a look. The book recounts some of the problems than can arise when dumb technology meets ordinary human beings.

Take, for instance, the case of the Ukrainian businessman who put 50 new pagers — a gift for his employees — in the back seat of his car and then promptly crashed into a lamppost when they all began beeping at the same time. The culprit? A welcome message sent by the pager company to each of the pagers.

Way to get repeat business, guys…

[Via Boing Boing]

Fans of Newcastle United will wish to keep an eye on Black & White & Read All Over:

A warm welcome from your hosts Paul and Ben to Black & White & Read All Over, a brand new blog dedicated to the discussion of the splendidly self-destructive and calamitous circus that is Newcastle United. If you’re a fellow sufferer then have a read and feel free to share your views / woes, and if you’re not then either feel our pain or more likely have a bloody good laugh. Win, lose, draw or put a £23m bid in for a player we haven’t got a snowflake’s chance in hell of signing when what we desperately need is a few defenders - life’s never dull at St James’s Park.

Judging by the Match of the Day footage this evening there wasn’t a dull moment at Villa Park this afternoon either…

I have a terrible feeling that this script is a great deal more entertaining than the film proper will turn out to be:

[…]

On Coruscant, Supreme Chancellor Palpatine is asleep at his desk. There is a bottle of very strong Altarian vodka, empty, lying on the desk. The doorbell rings, waking Palpatine.

Palpatine: “Um, just a minute!”

Palpatine grabs the bottle, turns around towards the bin at the back of his office, and comes face to face with a large, brightly-coloured banner reading ‘Yay Galactic Domination’. He stares at it for a moment, then at the bottle, then back at the banner.

Palpatine: “I don’t remember putting that there…”

He shrugs, tosses the bottle into the bin, and stuffs the banner up on top of the office window’s curtain rail. He then returns to his seat, tries to sit down but misses slightly, then grabs his chair and lowers himself carefully to it.

Palpatine: “Come in!”

The door opens, and Master Yoda and Mace Windu enter.

Palpatine: “Honoured Jedi, please have a seat. What can I do for you?”

Windu: “We’ll ask the questions, motherf-”

Yoda (loudly): “Forgive Master Windu, difficult time has he had. Fought many battles, entirely himself at the moment he is not.”

Palpatine: “I understand. This is a trying time for us all.”

Windu: “Trying? Hey, man, don’t give me that sh-”

Yoda: “Here we are, for information to ask.”

Palpatine: “I doubt I could know anything the great Jedi Council cannot discern on its own, but I will tell you all I can.”

Windu: “You bet your white-boy ass-”

Yoda: “Rumours we have heard. Strange places, mutterings in, there are. At work, Sith Lords, in places of power, suggestions there are.”

Palpatine: “Sith Lords?”

Windu: “You got a hearing problem, assho-”

Yoda: “Senators, over, influence, Sidious, rumours, Darth, named, Lord, Sith, are, of, many, a, there, with.”

Everyone is silent for a moment.

Windu: “What the hell did you just say, man?”

[…]

[Via Christopher Adams, posting to rec.arts.sf.written]

Bruce Sterling has been taking part in an online chat at The Well about his new novel, a technothriller called The Zenith Angle. As usual, the Viridian Pope-Emperor proves immensely quotable. On the post-September 11th world:

[…]

When I was in Washington researching spacewar for WIRED, I was very aware that I was in the middle of a right-wing technothriller novel that was struggling to write itself.

September 11 had some cornball aspects to it; it really was gaudy, gory and excessive, like Z-grade Hollywood disaster fare. The business with the missing WMD is very Dr Strangelove — it’s like some loon in a wheelchair barks “coalmine gap with the Russians!” and every living soul takes that logic at face value. Everybody buys into the mythical WMDs… It’s an error in judgment so colossal that it can’t even be whispered aloud. Why did the world believe in this?

Hussein has been in custody for months now. What’s his storyline about the WMDs? Did he never have any? Did he think that he had some? Did he order them made and nobody obeyed? Did he destroy them all at the last minute as a political ploy?

Even if he wants to lie about it, why is there such a haze of obscurantism about his means and motives? It doesn’t feel like foreign policy at all; it’s like a thriller movie where the director died, the screenwriter drank himself into a fit and then the whole biz was patched-together by special-effects guys somewhere in Turkey.

[…]

[Via Boing Boing]

Neil Gaiman has posted a series of four very nice stills from Mirrormask.

When I say “nice”, of course what I mean is “rather creepy, yet oddly attractive.”

Did anyone else hear those “Thatcher accused of organising a coup” headlines on the radio earlier this week and think, “Omigod, she’s back”?

What could be more natural than to turn the film version of Planet of the Apes (that’s the one starring Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter, not the 70s TV series or Tim Burton’s pointless re-imagining of the story featuring Mark Wahlberg) into an episode of The Twilight Zone? (NB: 61MB Quicktime video - but very much worth the wait.)

Now could somebody please repeat this trick for The Village? Not that it’d make the backstory any less silly, but at least you’d only be sacrificing 30 minutes of your life for the privilege of having your intelligence insulted.

[Via Boing Boing]

It’s late and I really don’t have the time to detail all the reasons M Night Shyamalan’s The Village disappoints. I will say that none of this is the fault of the actors: Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, William Hurt, Brendan Gleeson and Sigourney Weaver deserve great credit for ploughing their considerable talents into a script that really didn’t deserve them. Newcomer Bryce Dallas Howard was a revelation in the central role. Come to that, the film is beautifully photographed and there’s a ton of lovely production design going on in the background. The problem is that swallowing the storyline (and the implied backstory) requires far, far more Willing Suspension of Disbelief than I could muster.

Do us all a favour: do not encourage M Night Shyamalan by adding to The Village’s box office take. This man is a talented director, but he desperately needs to take a break from twist endings for a film or two.

As someone who’s been known to play around with clever gadgetry from time to time, I’m loath to dismiss any techie toy as a waste of good microchips. Even so, I’ve got to say that the Wave Pillow seems remarkably pointless.

The idea is that your home computer runs some software which uses the internet to connect to a computer which monitors the state of the surf at a number of “surf spots” around the world. Having received this data, your computer then varies the strength with which the pillow vibrates so as to match the pattern of the waves in your chosen surf spot.

I can understand that someone might enjoy the sensation of their pillow vibrating slightly as they drop off to sleep. I can even see that you might want the vibration to vary a bit. But what difference does it make whether your pillow’s vibration matches the surf on a web site thousands of miles away?

The phrase “gilding the lily” comes to mind…

[Via Engadget]